Mars Rover Curiosity - Mission: Is the Mars Environment Able to Support Microbial Life?

Mars Rover CuriosityMission: Is the Mars Environment Able to Support Microbial Life?

Mars Rover CuriosityMission: Is the Mars Environment Able to Support Microbial Life?

The wheels and suspension system have been installed on NASA's next Mars
rover, Curiosity, a key step in assembly and testing of the flight
system for the Mars Science Laboratory mission slated to launch in November 2011.

The centerpiece of MSL, Curiosity has six wheels and a
rocker-bogie suspension system like its smaller predecessors: Spirit,
Opportunity and Sojourner. Each wheel has its own drive motor and the
corner wheels also have independent steering motors.

Unlike earlier Mars
rovers, Curiosity will also use its mobility system as landing gear
when the mission's rocket-powered descent stage lowers the rover
directly onto the Martian surface on a tether in August 2012.

The Mars Science Laboratory (MSL), known as Curiosity, is a NASA rover
scheduled to be launched in November 2011 and would perform the
first-ever precision landing on Mars.

It is a rover that will assess whether Mars ever was, or is still today, an environment able to support microbial life.

In other words, its mission is to determine the planet's habitability.
It will also analyze samples scooped up from the soil and drilled
powders from rocks.

The MSL rover will be over five times as heavy as and carry over ten
times the weight of scientific instruments as the Spirit or Opportunity
rovers.

The United States, Canada, Germany, France, Russia and Spain will
provide the instruments on board. The MSL rover will be launched by an
Atlas V 541 rocket and will be expected to operate for at least 1
Martian year (668 Martian sols/686 Earth days) as it explores with
greater range than any previous Mars rover.

Mars Science Laboratory is part of NASA's Mars Exploration Program, a
long-term effort of robotic exploration of Mars, and is a project
managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The total cost of the MSL
project is about $2.3 billion USD.

The Curiosity Rover is a robotic Rover for exploring mars. This Rover is
the next Generation of Mars Rovers beyond Spirit and Opportunity. The Mars Rover Curiosity's mission is to determine the
planet Mars
habitability.

Curiosity

Meet NASA's New Mars Rover

Highlights from the stunning mission animation of "Curiosity" - NASA's
new one tonne Mars Rover which is set to reach the Red Planet in 2012.

The video is set to excerpts of "Mars, Bringer of War" and "Uranus, The
Magician" from Holst's Planet Suite.

"Curiosity
will be prospecting for organic molecules, the chemical building
blocks of life," says Joy Crisp of NASA's Jet Propulsion
Laboratory. "We want to find out whether Mars' environment
was, or still is, capable of harboring life."

Curiosity
will be the first red planet rover since Spirit and Opportunity.
Though it would be hard to match the twins' toughness, Curiosity
will have a much greater range, more instruments, and a bigger,
stronger robotic arm.

It will be nuclear powered instead of
solar, so there will be no worries about dust on solar panels
causing energy supplies to plummet. It will have much more
power, more consistently.

The Curiosity Rover
The Curiosity Rover is a robotic Rover for exploring mars. This Rover is
the next Generation of Mars Rovers beyond Spirit and Opportunity.

The MSL has four goals:

To determine if life ever arose on Mars,

to characterize the climate of Mars,

to characterize the geology of Mars,

and to prepare for human exploration.

To contribute to the four science goals and meet its specific goal of determining Mars' habitability, Mars Science Laboratory has eight scientific objectives:

Determine the nature and inventory of organic carbon compounds.

Inventory the chemical building blocks of life as we know it: carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulfur.

Identify features that may represent the effects of biological processes.

Investigate the chemical, isotopic, and mineralogical composition of the Martian surface and near-surface geological materials.

Interpret the processes that have formed and modified rocks and soils.